Patricia Clarkson in The Party (Roadside Attractions)

Slap! A wronged wife smacks her cheating husband hard and wakes up Sally Potter’s bitter black-and-white charmer. A drawing-room farce with a political undertone, The Party mocks today’s self-absorbed bourgeoisie while gleefully kicking up its heels in celebration of physical excess and outré behavior.

Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas, disheveled against type) attends to vol-au-vents in her kitchen while graciously accepting congratulatory calls on a constantly ringing phone. Her modest demurrals descend into a throaty purr—this woman’s clearly getting some action on the side. In her well-appointed London living room, her shambling, professorial husband (Timothy Spall) gingerly places a needle on a record and then proceeds to get shell-shocked drunk to the Spencer Davis Group’s oldie, “I’m a Man.”

Guests begin to arrive, and snappy dialogue establishes who they are: Janet’s stylish, cynical frenemy April (whip-smart Patricia Clarkson) and her New Age charlatan companion, Gottfried (Bruno Ganz); beatifically beaming lesbian academic Martha (Cherry Jones) and her visibly pregnant, much younger partner (Emily Mortimer). And, arriving without his wife, handsome but agitated young banker Tom (Cillian Murphy). The other guests will reveal their issues soon enough, but Tom heads straight into the bathroom to hoover up a big ol’ rail of cocaine. Sweaty, jumpy Tom not only has a head leaping with blow but he’s packing a revolver under his smart blazer. Whatever could go wrong tonight, when the group is celebrating Janet’s being designated shadow minister of health for the Labour government?

With the action confined to the house and garden, the ace cast tears into Potter’s corrosively witty script. Each actor gets to toss off a withering put-down, with Clarkson given the tigress’s share (April to Martha: “You’re a first-class lesbian and a second-rate thinker.”) Most get to unmask a shocking revelation, or at least confess an infidelity. (Two people vomit copiously.) Couples engage in arguments, spied wordlessly through a garden window or shot head-on in full dudgeon. Blows are even exchanged as the tension mounts and power dynamics teeter. All the while loud music wails away on the turntable and Tom can’t keep his nose out of the powder. Where’s that wife of his, anyway?

For all the wild goings-on, The Party is tightly paced and choreographed, as refined as its self-consciously evolved characters (Tom perhaps excepted). Its humor takes on a subtle political cast. These articulate and high-performing people—as morally upright, PC, and do-gooding as they claim to be—quickly turn as sordid and hypocritical as the rest of us. Why, someone even dares to see a private doctor instead of consulting Labour’s beloved National Health Service. Until a surprise ending that isn’t quite a surprise, the social circle’s bitter reckoning with each other recalls a busier and more antic production of No Exit. Hell is other people, indeed, and a hell of a lot of wicked fun.